Once it was a plucky upstart, but now the multi-billion-dollar firm is charged with invading our privacy. Lawrence Donegan reports
Sunday April 4, 2004 The Observer
In and around the Googleplex - the name given to the Silicon Valley offices of the internet search engine Google - it's a source of great corporate pride that the company's name has become a verb. But if Sergey Brin and Larry Page had yesterday googled the name of the company they founded, they might have been disturbed by the first item retrieved.
'Google's Email raises Privacy Fears,' declared the Indian Express, a headline echoed around this world last week after the company announced it is to offer a free email service called Gmail. A few years ago, when Google was viewed as a radical underground internet experiment, Gmail would have been viewed as evidence of its energy, foresight and public spiritedness. In the new world, with Brin and Page on the cover of Newsweek and their company on the verge of the biggest public stock offering in recent American corporate history, Gmail has been decried as the final proof that Google has gone over to the 'dark side', occupied by Bill Gates and his fellow corporate suits.
On a technological level, Gmail (which will start as a pilot project) is far superior to similar services currently offered by the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft. The initial analysis was that Google had continued its tradition of besting the competition.
And then people read the small print. There, lost beneath the folksy explanation of why Google was offering the service - a user had 'kvetched' (complained) about spending all her time organising her email account, according to Brin - the company revealed it would be employing technology that would search through the contents of its users' emails, thereby enabling it to place related adverts alongside those emails. If, for example, a user mentioned DVDs in the text of his or her email, then Google could attach an advert for a company selling cut-price DVDs.
At the Googleplex this idea was simply a question of commercial imperative: web advertising currently generates $4 billion in revenue each year - a figure which is expected to triple over the next four years. Google, with 25 per cent of that market, is seeking to expand its share in the face of aggressive competition. But for America's army of privacy protection lobbyists the arrival of Gmail was the worst idea since the Pentagon dreamed up Total Information Awareness - a computer program which would track the activities of America's 300 million citizens. (It was subsequently abandoned due to the political outrage it caused.)
'It's absurd that using a communications medium should subject one to privacy-invasive advertising,' said Chris Hoofnagle of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre. 'Why not put an operator on the phone to listen to your conversation and pitch things to you while you're talking? You'd say that's ridiculous. Well, this is ridiculous. We have a norm in this country not to allow commercial interests to interfere with our communications.'
Richard Smith, a privacy and security consultant, was even more succinct. 'It's one of the creepiest things I have ever heard of,' he told Wired magazine. 'Can I, as a pro-life person, for example, target email messages that seem to be about abortion?'
Jordana Beebe of the San Diego-based Privacy Rights Clearing House said: 'The privacy implications of going through and perusing a customer's email to display targeting advertising could be the Achilles' heel for Google's service.'
Google, which has enjoyed an almost slavishly admiring press since its launch, is unused to dealing with criticism. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that its response to last week's onslaught veered from unconvincing ('The ads would be akin to coupons that shoppers get at grocery stores, based on what they've just purchased') to apologetic ('We'll learn. I'm sure our users will tell us frankly when we don't get it right, and we'll adjust accordingly') to simply bemused ('I am very surprised that there are these kind of questions,' said Larry Page.)
Page had better get used to answering tough questions. Now Google has announced its intention to take on the established might of Microsoft and Yahoo, he is about to discover that wealth and power in the internet age come with drawbacks - the most troubling of which are the enemies you make.
Silicon Valley has been woefully short of success stories over the past few years. Google (the name comes from the noun googol, which means the number 1 followed by 100 zeros) is proof that the internet can deliver the life-improving innovation its earliest advocates promised it would.
Eight years ago Larry Page and Sergey Brin were two PhD students at Stanford University with a project. 'BackRub', as they originally called their search engine, operated by counting the number of links to a webpage and then presenting the most 'popular' at the top of the ranking in any search query. Even in its nascent stages the search engine quickly become popular among staff and students at Stanford.
The pair abandoned their studies and launched a company out of a garage rented to them by Susan Wojcicki. 'My reaction was, "OK, good luck, the rent's $1,700 a month and don't forget to separate the recycling,"' Wojcicki recalled.
Within a year the company had outgrown the garage and moved to new offices close to the university. Six months later it had raised $25m in venture capital.
This wasn't a lot of money in those heady days, when internet companies selling pet food were valued at $500m. But Google had an advantage over the vast majority of dotcom companies - it was offering something the public actually wanted.
Now it deals with more than 138,000 queries every minute, in 100 languages; that's over 200 million searches of six billion webpages over the course of a day. Such is the power of Google that it no longer simply reflects what is happening on the web - it influences it. Many internet consultants now make a living advising clients on how to build their webpages in a way that will ensure them a high ranking when their field of expertise or commerce is 'googled'.
Wojcicki, who left her job at Intel to work for her former tenants, is one of more than 1,000 employees at the Googleplex, the sprawling campus 50 miles south of San Francisco that not only houses Google's operations but sustains its reputation as a benevolent presence in a cut-throat world. In the wine bars and restaurants of Silicon Valley, the Googleplex has achieved legendary status - from the company chef (a former employee of the Grateful Dead) who cooks free food for the employees, to the unlimited ice cream, the pool and ping-pong tables and complimentary massages. In an industry where 14-hour days are the norm, Google employees are encouraged to spend 20 per cent of their time in the office on outside activities. 'Larry and Sergey built Google to be their dream environment,' Wojcicki says.
Many people would kill to land a job there, but for most it's too late. Those like Wojcicki who signed on early are about to be rewarded for their foresight and loyalty. The company's stock offering later this year will make multimillionaires out of many, and billionaires out of Brin and Page, who were included on Forbes magazine's most recent list of America's richest people.
On the downside, at least from the point-of-view of the company's two iconoclastic young founders, the stock offering will wipe away the last vestiges of Google's reputation as a renegade operation. No longer will it be seen as the plucky young upstart out to tweak the tail of the business establishment.
As Google discovered to its cost last week, corporate adulthood means never being given the benefit of the doubt, no matter how well intentioned you might be. A warm and fuzzy office culture is no defence against accusations of eroding civil liberties. Nor will it help when the big cats of the hi-tech world finally get their corporate act together.
Already Yahoo has spent an estimated $1bn on new search engine technology aimed at eating into Google's share of the advertising market. And even more worryingly for the folks at the Googleplex, the biggest beast of all has finally stirred. In a recent interview, Bill Gates conceded that Microsoft had been complacent in developing search engine technology but added: 'We recognise that, and now we're on the job.'
Google has professed itself indifferent to the Microsoft founder's apparent intentions, but given his history of crushing all opposition, Gates's remarks are surely enough to put anyone off their bowl of ice cream - even if it does come free.
Google Facts Google started life as a university research project called BackRub. Today 138,000 people around the world search the web using Google every minute
Google People Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are described by friends as eccentric. Page's priniciple claim to fame before Google was that he built a working computer printer out of Lego.
Google Culture The Googleplex houses more than 1,000 employees and provides them with free meals (cooked by the Grateful Dead's former chef), free ice cream, free massages and a fleet of Segway scooters.
Google Philosophy: 'Volleyball courts, masseuses, all of these things - they are all pretty well thought out. It saves time - people don't have to drive off campus, park somewhere, wait in line for food' Sergey Brin http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1185534,00.html